Wagner James Au reports on virtual worlds, VR & Internet culture

Friday, August 01, 2008

Will Second Life Be Popular After Popular Places Are Gone?

With little fanfare, the "Popular Places" tab has been removed from the latest version of Second Life, replaced by an editorially-selected Showcase of high quality sites and locations. (This move was announced by the Lindens last April, a belated response to the gaming of Popular Places with camping chairs, bots, and other controversial means landowners use to artificially boost foot traffic count.)

What happens now? RightasRain Rimbaud, CEO of metaverse development company (and NWN partner) Rezzable, offers some provocative speculations: "Expect to see a drop of... as much as 10,000-15,000 users at peak times." That'll be something to look for this weekend, with Sunday around 2pm-3pm SLT usually hitting the maximum concurrency of about 65,000. Then again, the latest viewer upgrade is still an optional one, so any impact of losing Popular Places may not measurably register until it becomes mandatory.

In any case, Rimbaud thinks the real solution for improving user experience and just as crucial, helping in-world businesses grow, isn't a Showcase.

Instead, he believes what's needed is an improved Classified Ads
and directory system. ("[The Lindens] could sell, er, keywords for
classifieds? ... noobs are still the future for any merchant hoping to
have a business with positive monthly Linden Dollar flow or even
positive monthly real money flow.")

Even when I was a newbie I never used Popular Places as a way to find something. I think I used it one or two times and realized that popular places meant ...something but it wasn't anything I was looking for. Definitely nothing I'd want to go back to .

Put me in the camp that appreciates the removal of Popular Places. I've enjoyed using Showcase to find new spots. However, I think that the real target audience for Showcase is new users that are looking to explore a bit. Hopefully, it will give them a taste of the creativity and diversity present within Second Life. I know that I would have appreciated something like Showcase when I first tried SL. I remember being baffled by the Popular Places listings, which were filled with odd locations like Welfare Island -- it wasn't very inviting, to say the least!!!

Oh sure, nudity is all about people jacking off to Second Life. The Lindens removed a naked George Bush caricature lest people get aroused by it. The Lindens destroyed a statue with nipples lest someone soils their undies because of it. That's what this is all about, Rezworthy, you are so right.
/sarcasm

I have to agree with RightasRain Rimbaud. The showcase is not the solution and for the current size and scale of Second Life, let alone the potential future size of SL, the search tools on offer are barely adequate. One of Second Life's greatest strengths is its diversity and the search/navigation tools just don't present this well, particularly for the newbies that need these tools most.

I am glad to see the Popular Places tab go. It was never really useful to begin with. I think SL needs something more of user-generated metric for recommended places...much like the YouTube and Flickr favorites. At one point, I thought LL was going to harness the information from the My Picks tab of all avatars to generate some type of rating system of in-world locations. That was a good idea. Whatever happened to it, I know not.

Personally, I think Rightasrain is as wrong as Chicken Little on this one. Popular Places was utterly useless. Few residents past 4 wks of age ever used it, mostly b/c the only places on the list were bot & camper farms w/ screaming lag and little value. If the concurrency drops, it likely will reflect the abandonment of camping alts, to which I say good riddance. The measure of the overall worth of a place is not now, nor has ever been, measured accurately by traffic. I run in a lot of circles, and we NEVER discuss a place's PP numbers. WE're more likely to discuss places we've seen personally, or interesting travelogue reviews we've read. This, to me, just falls in the category of one more melodramatic wail that this change or that will Spell The End Of Second Life (cue minor-key music in the background).

About Picks as a rating system: it's being gamed now. Vendors are paying people to list their stores as Picks (and requiring that the listing remain for a specified interval before paying, so you can't list a store, get the loot, and drop the store immediately. For that matter, one can instruct bots to list one's store as a Pick as well.

(BTW, when I signed on Sunday, there were 60+K clients signed on. I don't think the drop will be that much.)

I'm not sure who can talk about popular places as being useful with a straight face? That was probably the most useless tab in the UI. I'm glad to see it and its top ten of camping alts and lag GO.

At least showcase shows some interesting places. I also don't understand what all the bitching and moaning for "edgy" places in shwocase is about? Edgy doesn't necessarily mean good. Showcase should be for the best builds, not for reputation. Perhaps its this fear we'll be flooded with soccer moms who scream "Think of the children!" Pleaaaaase. Not everyone is in SL for the gritty realities of life, violent RPing, sexual role play and social activism (< /sarcasm >)

Personally, I really wish the search tools were improved. It's difficult weeding out useless places, and annoying to not be able to find people easily (aside from knowing their exact name)